Release

JACQUELINE HUMBERT & DAVID ROSENBOOM

Daytime Viewing

UW10
| June 2013

All items include instant download

You May Also Like

Release Info

Daytime Viewing (1979-80) is an extended narrative song, based on a casual analysis of daytime television drama and the audience phenomena such programming addresses. The piece explores the use of fantasy as a survival mechanism against loneliness, illustrating the human compulsion to inflate the mundane to mythological proportions. A central female character weaves tales, using threads of personal experience and the idea of TV as friend, as mantra, and as transformational window between imagined spectacle and the pedestrian plane.

Originally released as a private cassette edition [recorded, 1982; Chez Hum-Boom release, 1983] documenting the collaborative performance piece of the same name by Jacqueline Humbert & David Rosenboom, this heady, thoroughly enjoyable work is available for the first time ever on CD and LP. Jacqueline Humbert (aka J. Jasmine) is a songwriter of brains and wit on par with Robert Ashley, with whom she's worked extensively. David Rosenboom's complex, harmonic electronic arrangements are accentuated brilliantly by percussion from William Winant. Daytime Viewing can happily be added to a small but significant group of work that, through lesser-known paths, engaged in an equally revelatory reexamination of the Great American Songbook as Minimalism did with 20th Century composition. Mastered by David Rosenboom.

Press

"A recording of the piece was released as a low-circulation private cassette in 1982, and remains a captivating listen: Humbert’s performance is hypnotic, and Rosenboom’s lush electronics, conjured on his own self-designed Touché device, manage to sound cheery and eerie all at once. Marmite stuff, for sure, butDaytime Viewing is recommended listening for those with a penchant for Laurie Anderson or, more recently, Julia Holter’s eloquent pop suites." - FACT Magazine

"'And when there was nothing, no feeling, no access, no contact, no one, she turned the channel, chose a new view.' Before the internet, cultural critics used to foam at the mouth during discussions of human interaction with television. In 1979, the medium was just over a couple of decades old, and a subsuming, multi-sensory experience was pretty fascinating and even scary before we became totally desensitized to it. This was the context for Daytime Viewing, Jacqueline Humbert's and David Rosenboom's collaborative performance piece which unfurled the narrative of a woman's friendship with her television. As demonstrated by "Talk 1" this is not some lament of the lowbrow, instead an ode to television viewing, during which "dream time [becomes] her horizon." The sentiment is underpinned by the most blissful of synthesizers. Notably, Humbert studied with American composer and contemporary opera writer, Robert Ashley. Rosenboom was a pioneer in using neurofeedback in composition." - AdHoc

"Humbert’s voice and Rosenboom’s synthesizers are joined in places by the percussion of William Winant to create a landscape that is both lush and spry. Humbert’s soothingly rich, almost mechanized vocals set the stage for the record’s characters in a literal sense, earnest and necessarily removed. Rosenboom’s Buchla synthesizer is responsive and undulates with Humbert’s voice, taking flight where lyrics are absent... Daytime Viewing is a fascinating set of music that deserves an earnest hearing." - Tiny Mix Tapes

Video

Album preview video, featuring stills used in the original Daytime Viewing performances.

All the line drawings are by Jacqueline Humbert, drawn on vellum.

David Rosenboom created the color backgrounds with a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer, which was nicknamed "CoCo." He wrote software in BASIC with graphics extensions to create abstract, colored landscapes. To create the stills in the slides, we displayed my graphics program images on a color monitor and placed the translucent drawings directly on the monitor, which illuminated them. The results were photographed to make the slides. For each camera shot, the graphics images were held static.

In live performances, often the slides were projected with pairs of projectors and dissolve units. The graphics programs could also be run in active mode, with images constantly changing and shifting. In performances they could be projected as backgrounds, shown on video monitors as set elements, or projected onto other objects. These things were selected and arranged to fit the circumstances of particular performances.